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To add to this: Never use a @gmail.com address, buy your own domain and pay the $6/mo to get a Google GSuite with your name@fullname.com address instead. If Goo
by ukoki 6y ago
To add to this: Never use a @gmail.com address, buy your own domain and pay the $6/mo to get a Google GSuite with your name@fullname.com address instead. If Google locks your account, you can now move your email hosting to another provider and won't lose access to your entire digital world.
Be aware that doing this now means your DNS provider and domain registrar become vectors for hackers to take over your email account, so make sure these are companies your trust and your access to these accounts is as secure as possible (ie strong unique passwords and app-based, not SMS-based two-factor authentication)
- DaiPlusPlus 6y agoYeah but they’ve still got your emails.
- 0-_-0 6y agoFor that you have this: https://takeout.google.com/ https://takeout.google.com/ You can export all your email in a single .mbox file. This might not work if your account is suspended, but if you set up email forwarding to an alternative address (e.g. to protonmail) that might still stay active so you can transition your addresses.
- saagarjha 6y agoI wonder if Google lets you Takeout if they’ve locked your account…
- londons_explore 6y agoThey do now (although you only have 7 days to do so I think). It also depends on the reason for the block - if for example they suspect you of having illegal content (child porn) in your Gmail, you aren't allowed to takeout it.
- sneak 6y agoThat's great news. Facebook and Twitter don't (Facebook as of a few years ago, Twitter as of this year), as I learned the hard way.
- occamrazor 6y agoIf you are in the EU, GDPR says they have to.
- gzer0 6y agoThe GDPR (in Article 15(4)) states that the right to obtain a copy of your personal data should not ‘adversely affect the rights or freedoms of others’. This means that when responding to an access request, the controller should consider the rights of third parties, such as their data protection rights, trade secrets, or intellectual property rights such as copyright. This could arise, for example, where your access request relates to a record containing both your personal data but also the personal data, trade secrets, or intellectual property of others. A balancing of rights exercise would need to be conducted by the controller to balance your right of access your personal data as against the identified risk to the third party that may be brought about by the disclosure of the information. The GDPR notes that these considerations should not result simply in a refusal to provide all relevant information, but the controller should endeavour to comply with the request insofar as possible whilst also ensuring adequate protection for the rights and freedoms of others.
- lucb1e 6y agoGoogle doesn't let you Takeout when you don't allow Google to track your browser. It will give an error to "please use a device you regularly use" even if you can see in your account that there are no other active sessions that you could possibly make use of. I tried a few hours later with the session still open but no dice. Guess I'll have to find a human to talk to at Google in order to get my data pursuant article 15, GDPR. I have very little hope indeed that they will let you do a takeout without finding a human to talk to when your account is locked. For what it's worth, Facebook does let you do this. You login, get a message your account was banned for no apparent reason, and that you can download a copy of your data. Unfortunately it's broken (screenshot: https://dro.pm/a.png https://dro.pm/a.png) but hey, there was an attempt.
- saagarjha 6y agoUse a third-party client that grabs the emails locally.
- sdwolfz 6y agoWell, at least you don't lose everything. Worst case you lose access to a few emails you got in the time between begin locked out of your Google account and when you set up another email provider, and assuming you configured IMAP and use something like Thunderbird or K-9 as an email client (which I highly recommend) you should have a copy of all your email on your device (seriously don't use the Gmail app on Android, they even display ads in your email categories. I like GMail for their spam filtering power, and I honestly believe spam to be email's biggest weakness, and the reason people don't host their own. It certainly scares me, the thought of being flooded with thousands of spam emails daily, or the chance that my own emails would be falsely marked as spam since I'm not part of the major providers or because I did not configure it correctly. Don't know how this can be solved though, email itself is too permissive, and too "tweakable".
- signal11 6y agoThere are alternatives to GSuite -- for instance, Fastmail. Or even the old PObox.com service which has been around since the 90s and is really cheap (Fastmail have bought it now, I notice).
- MaxBarraclough 6y agoAlso, many registrars offer a managed email service.
- snorremd 6y agoFastmail is very good. The web client is pretty simple, but feels so darned responsive (as in fast) compared to what I was used to from GMail. And spam is so far a non-issue.
- ryandrake 6y agoOr, host your own on your own metal, to avoid depending on any third party. Alternatively, if you are ok with semi-dependence on a third party, get a $5/mo Linux VPS, and host your E-mail there. With your own Linux instance, you can host whatever you want, have full control, can host other services too like www, git, whatever, and have the assurance that you're not going to suddenly lose access because AI-BOT-204432 decided you violated some obscure terms of service. I've been doing this for close to a decade now (exim + dovecot for E-mail), and it works great. Back in the 90's, this used to be the default. How did we end up in this world where we so utterly rely on 3rd parties for such everyday critical Internet services?
- wool_gather 6y ago> How did we end up in this world where we so utterly rely on 3rd parties for such everyday critical Internet services? The same way we ended up in a world where we so utterly rely on 3rd parties for such everyday critical services as growing our food and fixing our cars. There's too many things to do for everyone to do them all on their own.
- bsder 6y ago
- ravenstine 6y agoThere's this thing called principle. It's not that we do something because we believe it's going to work. We do things out of principle because doing the right thing is the only rational alternative; because, if everyone held the same principles, then the problem would be snuffed of oxygen.
- londons_explore 6y ago$6/month doesn't sound like much... Till you realise you'll probably have this setup for 20 years, and suddenly it's $1200. That's a lot to protect against a thing that will probably not happen (account being banned)
- ukoki 6y agoIt's insurance, a waste of money most of the time, and extremely good value for money very occasionally
- stevekemp 6y agoI pay for gsuite for myself and a couple of my domains. Call it $12/month, because you'll want to setup two accounts: * The admin-user. * The daily/real-user. In my case I have my real account "steve@steve..", and "admin@steve" which is the gsuite administrator. I only login to make changes to the domain setup, never to send/receive email. It's annoying to have to pay for that second user, but I feel happier with the privilege separation in place.
- damnencryption 6y agoWhy not me@steve, iam@steve, thisis@steve, thereal@steve or any of the other variants?
- stevekemp 6y agoI've been using name@name.tld for a long time now, I realize the repetition reads a little oddly but I've never cared enough to switch to anything else. I guess I should have started using forname@surname.tld to make it all nice and neat, but I've no desire to change now.
- tehnicaorg 6y agoI find it strange to send someone an email and address it to "me". Autocompletion may also help when typing steve instead of "thereal".
- 6y ago
- DarthGhandi 6y agoYou don't need gsuite to both send/receive from a custom domain on gmail. Takes a few minutes extra messing around with settings I guess but they offer the service for free, I can guarantee this.
- IceWreck 6y agoYou can do this without paying as well. If your DNS provider supports email forwarding you can use that (if it doesnt you can use improvmx free tier) and use gmail's inbuilt smtp server to send emails using your own domain.
- sneak 6y agoThis is such excellent advice that I wrote a detailed step-by-step instruction guide for people that don't know how to do precisely that: https://sneak.berlin/20201029/stop-emailing-like-a-rube/ https://sneak.berlin/20201029/stop-emailing-like-a-rube/ It even has special instructions about how to secure the domain registration and DNS accounts. :) (Don't use G Suite, though.)
- bogomipz 6y agoI have attempted to read two articles on your site. As I am a privacy-focused person the articles were of interest to me. Both times I haven't gotten past reading the opening sentences when an obnoxious pop-up appeared asking for my email address. It seems ironic that someone publishing articles on privacy advocacy would be so keen to collect my email address. This practice also creates a real miserable experience and I have simply closed the page immediately both times. If someone is interested in subscribing to your newsletter why not simply provide a link for them to do so at the end of an article?
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- alisonkisk 6y agoAn email address is public information not private. You can have as many as you like for different purposes.
- mkl 6y agoEmail addresses are not public in general. They are not supplied to every site you visit automatically, and should not be manually supplied to every site you visit either. Whether it's a unique per-site address or not, it only makes sense to give it to people/organisations you want correspondence from. Therefore, sites that ask for it when you start reading an article seem really sketchy.
- pferde 6y agoYes, asking for an e-mail for site-update-sending purposes is very sketchy. That's what RSS is for, just publish a feed like a good netizen. And indeed, your site does have a RSS feed, so what's with the e-mail address collecting? Rude!
- forgotpwd16 6y agoFor those that don't want to pay, Yandex allows you to set up a number of emails using your own domain for free.
- andrepd 6y agoThe only thing worse I can think than having Google read your email is having Yandex read it.
- forgotpwd16 6y agoThe issue here isn't privacy but independence from a specific provider. If privacy is an issue as well then you should be using encryption as emails are not private.
- dewey 6y agoIt doesn't have to be fully trusting or not at all, there's different levels. I think using a provider you trust more (In my case Fastmail vs. Google) is a fair tradeoff. Fastmail has a pretty straight forward business model that makes sense to me so I feel like they don't have a reason to scan my emails for ad purposes or else. Of course if you are worried about some nation state looking into your emails you should encrypt them and use whatever provider.
- sundarurfriend 6y agoDepends on where you are. If you're in the US, sure, there is at least the theoretical possibility of legal protection against misuse. If you're elsewhere, they're not very different, and Yandex at least doesn't already have a million other data points about you to connect with this and build a bigger picture about your life.
- devdas 6y agoIf you aren't in the US, then Yandex is probably safer.
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- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- milkthefat 6y agoMy problem with the get your own domain and DNS is its far more likely I become incapacitated and become unable to pay or manage it than getting locked out of gmail or outlook mailboxes.
- xoa 6y agoIs it? You can register for 10 years at a time and then keep that topped up, as well as setup autopay pointed at a bank account with as many years of funds as you'd like. At some point the likely limiting factors shift to other things. Even the most reliable longest lasting registrars could in principle go out of business or get bought, but then again Google could decide to radically alter or discontinue services at some point too (as they indeed frequently have), or get broken up or who knows. 10 years is quite a while. And while nothing about business dealings is completely certain, someone paying for a domain a revenue generator with potential for more, so even if a registrar was acquired they'd have strong incentive to try to roll over existing accounts barring active objection. I don't know your personal circumstances of course, different people may very reasonably make different calculations. But I have more trust in a quality registrar and my bank then in Google under the most likely scenarios where I'd still care (long comas aren't impossible to come out of, even multi-year, but chances of just partial recovery plummet after even a month or two let alone full recovery). I think Google being capricious or making a mistake is a bigger concern, if only because there is almost zero chance of recovering from it (basically have to know a well placed Googler or manage to go viral or be a big enough presence to get their attention). Domains and finance in contrast are both full of competition and portability.
- alisonkisk 6y agoIf you are doing all that, why use Google at all? Just to get the broken GSuite variant of Google?
- Nursie 6y agoAs long as you don't want to use any Nest products, which now insist that you have a gmail.com address as apparently hosted domains are for business only.
- adrianmonk 6y agoThere have been a ton of products where Google didn't initially support that but eventually added it. Maybe Nest will one day. Obviously their sign-in/account infrastructure creates technical impediments against making their products do what they want. They should really fix that.
- Nursie 6y agoIt appears to have been a deliberate choice, and one they have justified on several occasions. That's not to say you're wrong, but it would be a turnaround at this point.
- waynesonfire 6y agoyep, noticed that too. i'm getting nagged to use my gmail login. what a virus. i will add that it's possible to create a google account WITHOUT gmail, https://support.google.com/accounts/answer/27441?hl=en https://support.google.com/accounts/answer/27441?hl=en maybe that's sufficient for nest.
- Nursie 6y agoHmm, thanks, I'll have a look into that. The objection to nest using "Google for Domains" or whatever they changed it to these days seems to be to do with the domain admin having access to everything. Which would be just fine for me, as I'm the only one that uses the domain. Hopefully signing my address up that way, when it's already a domain account, won't b0rk all sorts of other things :/
- charles_f 6y agoRelated to your warning, the story of that guy who lost his @n Twitter account because of that[1] (even though I think it still reduces the impact radius because until your password gets reset you can still access the service) [1]: https://medium.com/@N/how-i-lost-my-50-000-twitter-username-24eb09e026dd https://medium.com/@N/how-i-lost-my-50-000-twitter-username-...
- glokk 6y agoOnce you have your domain, you can use Zoho create emails for your domain for free. They don't offer IMAP/POP3 access in the free tier though.
- agapon 6y agoOr register a domain with Gandi and they provide a free email service to you. Only two free accounts (with "unlimited" aliases), but that should be sufficient for most personal uses.
- u801e 6y ago> app-based, not SMS-based two-factor authentication) How does that work when using an email client and connecting to the server and using SMTP and IMAP?
- StavrosK 6y agoYou generate one password per client (i.e. app-based).
- u801e 6y agoHow does the client identify itself during the SMTP or IMAP transaction?
- StavrosK 6y agoIt uses the password that you generated for it. I don't understand where the confusion is.
- jdeibele 6y agoThe confusion seems to be about logging into your account on the web versus using a mail client like Outlook or Thunderbird. Pick a service that lets you use a long password and a security key (like Yubikey) or authenticator (Google, Authy) to log in. Most services will then let you generate a specific password for an email client. I would assume that behind the scenes that the service is restricting what ports that password can be used on, etc.
- u801e 6y ago> I would assume that behind the scenes that the service is restricting what ports that password can be used on Assuming it's a device accessing the service over IMAP and SMTP that can access multiple networks, restricting by IP and/or port won't really help. As I noted in my other reply, it's easy enough to script access to the account if have the password and there's no real association between the application and the credentials that are used for access.